If you haven't heard of Nehahra, then I'm going to tell you that it is a Quake movie... What? It is a real movie with a plot, but it is done within Quake.... If you've ever seen the QdQ refilms, then this is taking that 20 time higher. The basic plot of Nehahra is Quake. It tells the story of Quake. I'm sure if you ever bothered to ready the story that id provided in the Quake manual, you probably thought it was pretty lame :) Well this movie fills in all the holes and makes it real. Quake actually makes sense! I didn't think I would but I watched the whole thing through in one sitting. Why's that so unbelievable? Well the running time is about 3 hours and 10 minutes. Quite an epic.... So if you can stand the 91 mb download and the 3d video card/450 mb disk space requirement, I suggest you check it out.

Oh btw, gamespy broke SDA's mkt.pl script about two days ago and haven't fixed it yet....

This past weekend, one of the longest running runners (he started shortly after me), Matthias Belz, visited Stefan Schwoon and the two of thre recorded a variety of different coop demos:

• Easy run of mexx3 in 0:38. (Single player is 1:11)
• Easy run of mexx9c in 1:17. (1:44)
• Easy run of pse2 in 0:40. (0:57)
• Easy run of From out of Nowhere in 0:33. (1:01)
• Easy run of Scoop of Choas in 0:27. (1:17)
• Runs on coagula in 0:09 on both easy and nightmare. I think these demos have a secret meaning to them...
• Runs on dxm in 0:08 on both easy and nightmare.
• 100%s on doom2_04 in 0:37 on both easy and nightmare.
• Easy 100% of a2d2 in 1:15, 42 seconds faster than the single player than Stefan had just done.
• Nightmare 100% of rd1m2 in 1:35. (2:27)
• Nightmare 100% of doom2_08 in 1:12. (2:04) Quite a gib-fest.

The Burmistrov brothers did two coop demos to:

• Easy 100% of beach1 in 0:21, four seconds faster than Johan and Carl.
• Nightmare 100% of beach1 in 0:20, three seconds faster than Johan and Carl.

Valeriy also did the easy 100% by himself in 0:28, three seconds faster than Daniel.

If you've never seen the beach1 map... well it's pretty damn ugly. But because of it's size and layout it's actually pretty good for speed running.

Other single player demos:

• Thomas Stubgaard totally destroyed my easy 100% of e3m3 with all the kills. He got a time of 10:44. My time was 25:07, so that's like more than 14 minutes faster!
• Janne improved Esa's easy run of harmsway-the long way, by 10 seconds to get 1:58.
• Esa improved Matthias's nightmare 100% of a2d2 by 46 seconds to get 4:25.
• Thomas Bergendorff improved Optic's easy 100% of The Epoch Turning by eight seconds to get 1:53. He described this demo as "...includes 2 grenadepushes off zombies, a grenadejump over a 'hole', a grenadepush off an ogre, a grenadejump off an enforcer and a grenadejump to gain some speed."
• Thomas B also improved his own nightmare run of epoch by 10 seconds to get 1:28.
• And he improved Optic's nightmare 100% of tspe by three seconds to get 1:22, by using a new route.

Mr Shambler passed along word that he is a pioneer in the speedrunning field again by doing the first ever Daikatana speedruns. There is also a demos section on PlanetDaikatana where you can submit your own demos.

Here's the usual huge update full of demos... some demos are dzipped and some are plain old zipped because I already had them uploaded before the new dzip was released.

id-level demos:

• Attila improved Qurre's easy run of e4m5-the long way, by one second to get 0:58.
• Thomas improved my nightmare 100% of e3m7 (the axe map) by 34 seconds to get 2:17. Well I dont have any nightmare 100% left on id maps :)
• Sergi improved Jordi's easy run marathon through the 2nd episode by four seconds to get 3:55. This marathon is really starting to get pushed to it's limits.

More hipnotic demos from me:

• Easy 100% of hip2m1 in 2:18, nine seconds faster than my previous one.
• Easy 100% of hip3m4 in 2:09, 32 seconds faster than Matthias.
• Nightmare 100% of hipdm1 in 1:33, 51 seconds faster than my last one. I also posted a new version of SoAstats to fix some bugs I found while doing that.

Marlo sent me eight demos a while ago, telling me to wait until he had 10 to post them, but I only gave him until the end of the month to give me the rest and he only gave me one more so here's just nine demos from Marlo... I learned just before this update that the 31st is Marlo's 18th birthday, so happy birthday Marlo! Don't drink too much :P

• Easy run of bnt (Bridges & Towers) in 0:47, one second faster than Daniel.
• Easy run of damaul3 in 1:55, 12 seconds faster than his previous run. Marlo got word of a shortcut straight from the level author.
• Easy 100% of azurette in 2:12, seven seconds faster than Ilkka.
• Easy 100% of Badlands 1 in 1:57, eight seconds faster than Optic.
• Easy 100% of bc2 (BC Dwellings) in 1:03, two seconds faster than Optic.
• Easy 100% of bnt in 2:41, five seconds faster than his previous demo.
• Easy 100% of Hell's Castle in 1:31, two seconds faster than Ken.
• Easy 100% of ih1m2 (The Necrohell) in 1:54, new to the charts.
• Easy 100% of Castle of Oblivion in 5:10, also new.

Matthias Belz did some more table filling:

• Nightmare run of a2d2 in 0:59. (Easy run is 0:47 by Thomas B)
• Nightmare 100% of a2d2 in 5:11.
• Nightmare run of a3 - the Journey Home in 1:58. (Easy run is 1:26 by Mr Shambler)
• Nightmare 100% of a3 in 3:53. (Easy 100% is 3:40 by me)
• Nightmare 100% of The Black Crypt in 2:08. (Easy 100% is 1:51 by Optic)

And some other demos:

• We have a new 'brother' in the speed running scene... Thomas's brother, Mads-Peter Stubgaard, improved my nightmare 100% of 4fiffy3 (RTD) by six seconds to get 2:47.
• Stefan did an easy 100% of a2d2 in 1:57.
• I did the nightmare 100% of assassin in 7:13, only six seconds slower than my easy 100%.

Stefan and I have released v2.0 of dzip, the Quake demo compression program that compresses quake demos to about half the size as zip. The windows exe has a vastly improved GUI, a lot like WinZip. Go grab it from the dzip page at QdQ, if you can... you might have problems (see my rant below). Feel free to start sending your demos as dz files... after all they are half the size so it's preferred from now on. And just to show how good dzip is, I've got a few of these for you:

MARATHONS!!!

Hey I'm crazy!!! crazy I tell you! I have done all eight 100% marathons in the hipnotic mission pak! :) I know you can't trust my opinion on my own demos but you simply must check some of these out if you have the hipnotic pak (and if you dont, why the hell not) You haven't seen such quality in huge 100% marathons since Marlos 86:48 through id1... The total size of these is about 11MB... compressed with zip they total 31MB!

• Easy 100% of hip1 in 9:43, 13 seconds faster than my previous one.
• Easy 100% of hip2 in 14:22, 22 seconds faster than my previous one.
• Easy 100% of hip3 in 8:52, 1:15 faster than Marlo.
• Easy 100% of all of hip in 34:21, 6:07 faster than Marlo.
• Nightmare 100% of hip1 in 11:20, 1:14 faster than my previous one.
• Nightmare 100% of hip2 in 20:31, 3:14 faster than my previous one.
• Nightmare 100% of hip3 in 15:36, 1:30 faster than my previous one.
• Nightmare 100% of all of hip in 51:28, brand spankin new!

Enjoy.... if your time is limited I'd recommened the nightmare ones over the easy ones. After all the total running time is almost 3 hours.

A rant

In case you haven't noticed, the place to get all the demos from, fileplanet.com, isn't as good as it used to be. It used to have many mirrors, and now there's only one, and it never works, so you're left with just the gamespy download. And to top things off, a lot of times you dont even get that page that shows the mirrors! I've been trying for hours now and www.fileplanet.com refuses to display anything at all. I dont know what to say except that gamespy has been promising to fix it for months now and it's only gotten worse. I sent an email to planetquake a while ago but never got a hint of a response. If you're on ICQ and would like a file on SDA that you're having trouble getting, feel free to ask me.

The map of attention in this update is climb, an old, rather small map, where the only monster is an ogre... In the last update, Fab improved Ken's easy 100% on it. Ken decided to improve his nightmare 100% of it before Fab did and got 0:59, three seconds faster than this previous. But that didn't stop Fab, who got a 0:51, for a total of 11 seconds better :) Fab also further improved his easy 100% to a 0:50. And then, just for kicks, I connected to Fab's computer and we did a 2p easy 100% in 0:45.

Dont fall down.....

Fab did three demos:

• He got 0:46 for the nightmare run of e2m1 - the long way, three seconds faster than his previous, and equalling Ilkka's time on easy.
• He improved my nightmare run of e4m5 - the long way, by six seconds to get 1:06.
• He improved Ken's easy 100% of climb by six seconds to get 0:55.

Matthias Belz did some table filling:

• Nightmare 100% of damaul3b in 1:17.
• Nightmare 100% of The Darkness within in 2:48.
• Nightmare 100% of Liquid Despair in 3:33.
• Nightmare 100% of The Ruiner's Revulsion in 2:15.
• Nightmare 100% of Missile Bunker Bravo 7 in 1:26.
• Easy 100% of mbb7 in 1:28, one second faster than the demo I did a few months ago just to fill the hole...

Everyone elses demos:

• Kare Slettnes improved his nightmare 100% of e1m3 by 10 seconds to get 1:52.
• I improved my nightmare 100% of hip2m1 by 10 seconds to get 2:29.
• Valeriy improved his nightmare 100% of doom2_07 yet again to get an amazing time of 0:17.
• Valeriy also improved the easy 100% of the end map by one second to get 1:57.
• Robert improved his coop nightmare 100% of e1m2 with Rickard (previously done with Alex) by five seconds to get 1:01.
• A new player, Esa "Power" Lähteenmäki, has done two table fillers: easy run of Harm's way - the long way, in 2:08, and nightmare run of tohnsay in 2:03.
• Optic improved his easy run of Empekoles Domain by six seconds to get 1:12.

<teaser>
It seems Markus has further improved his hidden nightmare run record of e1m3 by one second to get a 0:24.....
</teaser>

Just a bunch of new demos:

• Valeriy Burmistrov improved Chris's nightmare 100% of the end map by one second to get 1:58.993. I'd say he cut it close, how about you?
• He also did the 100%s on coop with his brother (?) Vlad Burmistrov, getting 1:55 on easy, a one second improvement, and 1:55 on nightmare as well, new.
• Valeriy and Vlad also improved the nightmare 100% of doom2_07 that Stefan and I made in Finland, by two seconds, to get 0:15.
• And Valeriy improved his previous single player nightmare 100% of doom2_07 by another second (his fourth entry) to get 0:18.
• Fab improved his nightmare run of e2m1 the long way by four seconds to get 0:49. Almost as fast as the easy record.
• Ken improved Chris's easy 100% of Hell's Castle by two seconds to get 1:34, but wasn't satisfied with it and sent a 1:33 a few days later.
• Optic improved his previous nightmare run of r1m2 by three seconds to get 1:44.
• I improved my nightmare 100% of hip1m1 yet again, this time by nine seconds, to get 1:28. Be prepared for a few more MB of hip demos from me, as soon as I finish the next version of dzip :)

That's all for now, enjoy!

Hi. This is just to say that I've been really busy recently, but there will be one last Run of the Week before (hopefully) Gerald takes over, if he can.

I'll make sure it's a good one, it'll probably be a slight variation on one of the more popular previous challenges, maybe one that had a word beginning with 'sk' in it's title. It'll probably appear some time next week, depending on my alcohol intake.

Many thanks to Nolan, BTW, on behalf of the rest of the SDA team for doing all this updating. Jesse and Ilkka are out of action, I'm very busy, and I don't know what has happened to Evan.

On that note, Jesse hasn't said so, I don't think, but he can't use his computer for some time, so Runner's Delight will be out of action for some time, I'm afraid.

Just a note that I added a Frequently Asked Questions page, linked at the top of the news. We've actually had one for quite a while but it wasn't linked to anymore and it needed updating.

Oodles of demos for this update... I was going to do it last night but put if off...

• Attila sent in a 1:02 for the easy run of e4m5 the long way, six seconds faster than Ken, but a little bit later, we received a 0:59 from Qurre. He did some crazy bunnies and even got a fiend boost...
• Fab filled the hole for the nightmare run of e2m1 the long way, getting a time of 0:53, just seven seconds slower than Ilkka's easy run.
• Shine improved Martin's easy run marathon through the 2nd episode, getting a time of 3:59.

That's all the singe player id demos. There's some 3-player id demos down a bit. Now for some demos I did:

• I improved Optic's nightmare run of hip2m3 by four seconds to get 0:48. Something weird happened at one point in this one...
• I also improved Optic's nightmare run of hip2m4 by four seconds to get 0:43. ph3ar my l33t bunnies :P
• I improved Will's nightmare 100% of hip3m4 by 48 (!) seconds to get 3:06.
• I was in the table filling mood, and did the easy 100% of assassin in 7:09. Not the prettiest level, but it's ok.
• and the easy 100% of The well of wishes in 2:18. Very nice level, if you've never seen it. I think you can use this level to define what "non-linear" means :)

A few demos from various people:

• Jozsef improved the runs of mbb7 by one second, he got 0:09 on both easy, and nightmare.
• Robert improved Stefan's easy run of oblivion by one second to get 0:12. Is this optimized already?
• Valeriy improved his easy 100% of jzblue3 by one second to get 0:17.
• Optic improved his nightmare run of r1m5 by 18 seconds to get 1:18.

Phallusy

The one level mentioned in the subject is the phallusy map, which was made for a contest at Mineral's page. I decided to add the map to the levels here at sda because it was designed for speedrunning....where else can you do a double-grenade-spawn jump?!? And because Jozsef sent in a 1:24 for the nightmare 100% on it, a 34 seconds improvment over Benny's winning entry for that type of demo in the contest. An easy 100% has not yet been done on this map...

[Mad] Coops!

Lots of coop demos for this update too. Robert, his brother Rickard, and his friend Alex are having a lan and have done many 3 player demos.

• Valeriy and Andrey improved Mattias and Gunnar's nightmare 100% of doom2_01 by six seconds to get 0:29. The doom conversion maps seen pretty popular for coop...
• Robert and gang did a nightmare run of e1m7 in 0:19, two seconds faster than the two player record (by just Robert and Rickard) and 10 seconds faster than the single player time.
• They improved Ravage, Shine and Mari's easy run of e2m2 by two seconds to get 0:26, now five seconds faster than the [hidden] single player time.
• They improved Filip, Jesper and Albin's easy run of e2m3 by five seconds to get 0:25, now nine seconds faster than the singe player. You need to see the boost they do :)
• They improved Mattias, Magnus and Gunnar's easy 100% of e2m4 by 13 seconds to get 0:56. This is 19 seconds faster than the 2 player time and 44 seconds faster than the one player.
• They improved the previous easy 100% of e4m3, by me, Gunnar and Evan, by 28 seconds to get 0:59, now 31 seconds faster than the single player time.
• They did a nightmare 100% of jzblue3 in 0:18, nine seconds faster than the single player. The poor shambers never stood a chance...
• They did a nightmare run of oblivion in 0:08. Robert and Rickard also did with just two players in 0:11, and on easy in 0:08.

Hey, just demos in this one:

• Marlo sent in a 0:34 for the nightmare run of e1m6, the long way, two seconds better than Ken, but about 15 hours later, we got a 0:32 from Qurre.
• Ken did e4m5, the long way, on easy in 1:08, only four seconds faster than my lousy nightmare demo....
• Stefan improved Mr Shambler's easy run of oblivion by two seconds to get 0:13.
• Robert did the run of oblivion on nightmare and got 0:21.
• I did the nightmare run of hip1m4 in 1:08, 17 seconds faster than Optic.
• Optic sent in several demos just in the past few hours, first improving Mr Shambler's easy run of ih1m4 by six seconds to get 0:29.
• Then he did it on nightmare in 0:46.
• Then he improved some demos on the oldest demos list, first getting 1:01 for the nightmare run of escape, two seconds faster than Matthias.
• He then improved Matthias's nightmare run of The Lost World by four seconds to get 0:54.
• And finally he improved his own easy run of r1m5 by four seconds to get 1:04.
• Ravage and Shine did a marathon coop easy run through id episode 4 in a time of 3:14, 10 seconds faster than Markus's single player record.

There hasn't been very many demos on the id maps lately... there's a few here though. Plus there's a new way to do a few of them. In the last update I revealed how Hanuu Kankaanpää showed that it is possible to kill the zombies on e3m3 when you start from scratch. So I opened up the first variant way to run a level... you can now do an e3m3 100% either with or without all the kills. Well now I'm going to do a few more :) Back at the end of 98, we had two run of the week contests to run e2m1 and e1m6 without using their well known shortcuts. Ilkka won both of them, but probably none of the newer people have seen or heard of these demos. Well they are now listed in the tables:

• Easy run of e1m6 "the long way" in 0:26.
• Easy run of e2m1 the long way in 0:46.

Feel free to improve those if you can, and do them on nightmare skill. You can also do a long version of e4m5 too, and I threw together a crappy run of it on nightmare in 1:12.

These will be the only id maps with variations... the reason is that the runs on these three maps are very short, (but still require super running skills) and their shortcuts always used. (BTW the demostats page page now lists 4 holes in the id maps, which has been 0 for a very very long time) But there will also be a few custom maps with the normal and long variety. For now you can do the following custom maps the long way:

• harmsway: No demos for this yet.
• polygon2: I did it on easy in 0:55 using three grenade jumps.

Again, for these maps, the current runs are not going anywhere, there is just added variety. On the other hand, for the maps that I recently threw out the runs on them, those runs are coming back and will be listed as "the cheap way" :)

And now for a few other id demos:

• Alexander Osipov got the record for the nightmare 100% of e1m2 back from Robert; he improved it by two seconds to get 1:10.
• Alex also improved his own easy 100% of e4m7 by four seconds to get 2:09.
• Martin Selinus improved Optic's easy 100% of e4m5 by nine seconds to get 1:36.
• Martin also improved Ravage's marathon easy run of id ep2 by two seconds to get 4:01.
• In the last update I forgot two of the unpublished QdQ demos:
  Ilkka improved his easy 100% of e4m1 by three seconds to get 0:57
  Marlo and Fabian did a nightmare run coop on e3m1 in 0:26 (actually slower than the new hidden single player record....)

<rumor>Thomas may have improved my nightmare 100% of e2m6...</rumor>

Dont underestimate the custom levels though!

I want to give a message about custom levels... I know a lot of people ignore them because they dont want to download the maps, and think the demos aren't very good. I was one of those people myself until four months ago when I finally got all the maps. Recently I've been watching many of the custom map demos and I must say that if you dont watch the custom map demos, you're missing out... I remember one map that had two explo box jumps for the run! And all kinds of other things that I cant remember :) I put a link at the top of the page to a list of recently added levels, so you can keep track of them. And now for some demos:

• Thomas Bergendorff did the easy run of a2d2 in 0:47 with some grenade jumps.
• He also did the easy 100% of well in 3:56, 23 seconds faster than Marlo.
• I did the easy 100% of polygon2 in 2:18, filling the hole.
• Optic ran through tohnsay on easy in 1:41.
• Valeriy Burmistrov improved the nightmare 100% of jzblue2 by six seconds to get 0:25.
• He also got help from Vlad to improve the coop easy 100% of jzblue3 by two seconds to get 0:13.

dzip GUI

First thing of note is that I released the first version of a GUI for dzip, I call it version 0.7 because it doesn't have full functionality yet. So go get it from the dzip page. I'm going to start directly linking to .dz files on larger demos here on the news, so it will be a good thing to have. Note though that those demos that are .dz will still have a .zip link to them on the mkt.pl pages because I forgot to ask Stefan to do that. :P (fixed now)

New Levels

A few people have been bugging me to add new levels, so I decided to add the levels that Mr shambler recently reviewed at his site. The first is alk07 - Egyptian Myth. I did two demos on it... the easy run in 1:17 (pretty fast for the route, but there is a better route...) and the nightmare 100% in 7:04. Download the map, and a progs patch, on the alk07 page. The second is a2d2 - Ambush keen pilgrims. Download the map here. I didn't do any demos here so it's a clean slate.

New Levels (??)

Hey didn't I just have that headline? Hmm, well this isn't really "new" levels... it's more like a new take on old levels. Everyone knows that it's not possible to kill the zombies on e3m3 right? Well everyone is wrong... that's right you can kill them. Rather than throw out the awsome demos that do not have the kills to replace them with boring demos that do get them, Stefan has come up with a way to have more than one kind of 100% for the same level. I managed to do the easy 100% with all the kills in an amazing 25:07! Feel free to improve :)

I've also taken the 100% demos on damaul3b that just had 1/2 secrets and made them the variety, and took the one demo that has both secrets into the "normal" spot. For now this is all the variations, but more will be coming soon.

And now for a few demos:

• Optic improved his easy run of badland1 by two seconds to get 1:04.
• He also improved his easy 100% of r1m1 by four seconds to get 2:24.
• Robert improved his nightmare run of coagula by four seconds to get 0:13, using a new kind of trick...
• Valeriy improved Marlo's easy 100% of jzblue_3 by one second to get 0:18.
• Shine improved Marlo's marathon easy run of ep3 by four seconds to get 3:03.

Unreleased demos

There are actually several demos on id maps that have not been posted here to SDA. They are part of QdQ projects that have not been released yet. But with the several incidents recently of people trying to improve the demos where there is an unpublished improvement, I talked to the people who have made the improvements and asked when they think should be done. After some debate, they agreed that I should post the times of their demos here to SDA, but still keep the demos unavailable. This way nobody tries to improve them anymore, and you are kept in suspense :) So here they are, in order of map:

• On e1m1, Markus got 0:23 for the easy run, one second faster than Ilkka.
• Attila and Peter did the easy run coop in a ridiculous 0:21, one second faster than their previous.
• On e1m2, Markus got 0:30 for the easy run, two seconds faster than Ilkka.
• Ravage and Shine also got 0:30 for the coop run.
• On e1m3, Markus got 0:32 for the easy run, five seconds faster than Evan.
• Ravage and Shine got 0:25 for the coop run, two seconds faster than Chris and Patrick.
• Markus also did the nightmare run in 0:25, three seconds faster than Yonatan.
• On e2m1, Peter got 1:09 for the easy 100%, nine seconds faster than his record.
• Attila and Peter got a 0:06 for the easy coop! :)
• On e2m2, Peter got 0:31 for the easy run, five seconds better than his current demo.
• Ravage and Shine also got 0:31 for the coop run.
• Peter got 0:38 for the nightmare run, seven seconds faster than Will.
• On e3m1, Markus got 0:24 for the easy run, one second faster than his current record.
• Attila and Peter had got 0:24 for the coop easy run long before Markus got his 0:24.
• Martin got 1:13 for the easy 100%, two seconds faster than Marlo.
• Markus did the nightmare run in 0:25, two seconds better than his current demo.
• On e4m1, Attila and Peter got 0:16 for the easy coop run, two seconds faster than the single player time.
• Ilkka and Juho got 0:17 for the coop on nightmare.
• On e4m2, Markus got 0:30 for the easy run, one second faster than Martin.
• Atilla and Peter had managed a 0:30 for the coop run before Markus got the 0:30 on single player.
• Markus got 0:31 for the nightmare run, three seconds faster than his record.
• On e4m3, Markus got 0:39 for the easy run, one second faster than his last demo.
• Markus did the nightmare run in 0:40, two seconds faster than him again.

These demos will be listed in the tables and have no link to them, until their respective QdQ project is released. One of them is getting "pretty close" to completion so you might see those demos within two months...

PS, I spent 3 hours on this update so something is probably screwd up somewhere... please let me know, if so :)

Since I will go to the army tomorrow, I will be pretty much away from the speedrunning scene for a year or so. I'll have a chance to check my e-mail about once a week.

One more demo before I leave:

• H1M1 easy 100% in 1:12 - Claimed my record back from Nolan, 3 seconds faster.

That's it. See you all laters...

I've got a whole three demos for you..... what the heck is everyone's excuse for not making demos huh?

• Ilkka really did improve Optic's easy 100% of hip2m3, getting 1:42, 19 seconds faster than Optic.
• Thomas Stubgaard improved my easy 100% of the ax-map, e3m7, by 12 seconds to get 1:35. (He says to expect the nightmare 100% soon).
• Robert Axelsson improved Ilkka's nightmare run of coagula by one second to get 0:17.

RotW

I just thougth I'd let everyone know what's going on with Run of the Week. Will says he is currently too busy to update the results of the last contest, but he will try to get them up as soon as possible. In two weeks or so, Gerald Tan (remember him?) might be taking over for Will. But in the meantine I'm going to initate a "Run of the interim period" or something. The idea came from Thomas.... can anybody do the nightmare 100% of e2m6? I did it almost three years ago in a time of 12:46. I dont remember how many kills I got, but it wasn't all of them either. (it's probably not possible to get *all* of the zombies, but I tried to get as many as possible). Now I know it's hard, boring, long, etc, but I'm sure there is somebody who reads this page who can beat my 12:46 and get at least the same number of kills. So I issue that as a challange until there is an official ROTW again.

dzip

If you haven't heard, Stefan released a Quake dem compression program that is about twice as good as a normal zip program. I've used it already on my most recent marathons. The current version is 1.1 and you can get it here but there's a 1.2 coming tomorrow (probably) that fixes a few bugs. Currently it's just a command line tool, but that will change as I'm working on a Winzip-ish GUI for it.

Update:
I kept forgetting to mention that Mr Shambler of TeamShambler Quake level reviews sent word of the first speed run ever for the game Wheel of Time, over at his other site, FPS demos and discussions. So if you have WoT, check it out.

More than half of the demos for this update are on the hipnotic pak. Many are by me, but some are by Ilkka and Optic too.

Ilkka did four demos:

• Nightmare run of hip1m2 in 0:12, one seconds faster and equalling the easy time.
• Easy run of hip1m3 in 0:48, 15 seconds faster, using a whole new route!
• Nightmare run of hip1m3 in 0:50, 26 seconds faster using the same new route, of course.
• Nightmare run of coagula in 0:18, six seconds faster, and also faster than the easy run. What's the trick here? well it involves an Ogre...

For the last update I did five nightmare 100%s of hipnotic stuff... for this one I did the easy 100%s of the same maps :)

• Easy 100% of hip2m1 in 2:27, 23 seconds faster than me.
• Easy 100% of hip2m2 in 2:57, 19 seconds faster than Ilkka.
• Easy 100% of hip2m6 in 2:40, 41 seconds faster than Matthias.
• Easy 100% of the 1st hip episode in 9:56, 1:13 faster than Marlo.
• Easy 100% of the 2nd hip episode in 14:44, 1:35 faster than Marlo.
• I also improved my nightmare 100% of hip1m1 by six seconds to get 1:37.
• And I got 1:15 for the easy 100% of hip1m1, five seconds faster than Ilkka. (had to work for that time)

Optic did a few demos too...

• He sent in a 2:04 for the easy 100% of hip2m3 but the next day sent in a 2:01, for a total of nine seconds faster than Ilkka. (Ilkka says he has faster already though but I dont see any demo Ilkka :))
• Nightmare run of mexx3 in 1:17, three seconds faster than his old demo.

Two demos from Thomas Bergendroff:

• Easy run of well (the map I threw out the 3s on) in 1:58, grenade jumps included.
• Easy 100% of placebo in 2:46, filling the hole.

And two demos from Robert Axelsson:

• Nightmare 100% of jzblue_3 in 0:27, 11 seconds faster than Marlo.
• Easy 100% of jzblue_3, with Rickard, in 0:15, four seconds faster than the single player.

And finally, Marlo improved Shine's easy run through ep3 by three seconds to get a time of 3:07.

This update will finally catch SDA up to date, posting all demos that were sent to SDA during SpeedCon (check out the new page for that if you haven't already) and those afterwards while we took a few days to post the Speedcon demos...

I'll start with demos from Optic:

• Easy run of r2m4 in 1:48, three seconds faster than me.
• Easy run of mexx4 in 1:23, three seconds faster than Mr J.
• Nightmare 100% of bbelief3 in 2:17, 35 seconds faster than Stefan.
• Nightmare 100% of bbelief4 in 2:58, 49 seconds faster than Stefan.

That's all from him, now for some Hipnotic demos from me:

• Nightmare 100% of hip2m1 in 2:39, 38 seconds faster than my old keyboard record.
• Nightmare 100% of hip2m2 in 3:55, 23 seconds faster than my old keyboard record.
• Nightmare 100% of hip2m6 in 3:13, 50 seconds faster than my old keyboard record.
• Only 5 keyboard demos left!
• I improved my marathon Nightmare 100% through the 1st hip episode by 1:49 to get 12:34.
• Then I filled the hole for the Nightmare 100% through the 2nd hip episode getting a time of 23:45. Nice times, eh?

Demos from Robert Axelsson:

• Easy run of coagula in 0:22, one second faster than his last demo.
• Easy run of darkfst in 2:42, three seconds faster than Ilkka.
• Nightmare run of darkfst in 2:43, nine seconds faster than Ilkka.
• Nightmare run of bbelief3 in 0:56, three seconds faster than Optic.
• Nightmare run of bbelief5 in 0:24, four seconds faster than Alex.
• Easy run coop with Rickard on jzblue_1 in 0:10, two seconds faster than the single player time.

Valeriy Burmistrov did some crazy stuff on the doom2_07 conversion map:

• He first sent in an two second improvement to the nightmare 100%, to get 0:20.
• The next day he send in a coop NH in 0:19, since at the time the current coop was 0:22. But a few days later Stefan and I got 0:17, as seen on the Speedcon page... but we didn't know about the 0:19 when we made it :)
• Valeriy also sent in a 0:10 for the coop EH that day.
• Two days later he improved the easy 100% coop to get 0:09!
• The next day he improved the nightmare 100% by another second to get 0:19! (I thought his 0:22 and 0:20 were already damn good)
• Finally, on the next day, he improved the easy 100% to get 0:10.
• So, should all four single player records plus the two coop records be put on the unbeatable list? It seems like it....

Martin Selinus improved the runs on the assassin map, to get 0:26 on both easy and nightmare.
Matthias Belz filled the 100% holes on the hunter map, getting 2:46 on easy and 3:09 on nightmare.
Thomas Stubgaard improved both 100%s on e3m3, getting 0:52 on easy, two seconds faster than Robert and 2:04 on nightmare, eight seconds faster than his last demo.
Ingmar improved Will's nightmare 100% of rd1m4 by eight seconds to get 1:43.
Ravage improved the nightmare run of e1m2 by two seconds to get 0:32.

Finally, I'm posting an improvement to the nightmare run of e1m1 that Ilkka did a long time ago, to get 0:26. This was originally a secret demo to be part of a QdQ project, but since Martin recently duplicated the demo I'm posting the original.

At last, the SpeedCon page is up. It took quite a while to sort everything out, loads of demos, pics, etc. to upload, and lots more is still to come, as so far only one of us has his pics available.

For those of you that don't know: SpeedCon was a meeting of speedrunners from all over the world last week, held in Finland, organized by SDA's own Ilkka Kurkela. Anyway, just check out the page, there's loads of super-high-quality madcoops (be sure to get that insane 6-player run of e1m4, for instance :).

Hey just a note of a few changes we've made to the tables. First thing is that any coop 'records' that are slower than the single player will not count as records anymore. They will still be available from the player's page and the level's page but wil not count as records. For example, easy run on e3m2, the 2p is slower than the one player... This also goes into higher player demos, for example the 6p easy 100% on e1m1 is slower than the 3p, so it does not count as a record anymore. For cases where the time is the same, the demo with more players will still count as a record if it was done before the one with fewer players. Thanks to Stefan for doing all the code for this.

The famous oldest 25 records page has been moved from the Demo stats page to the Oldest demos page, which also includes a list of "Unbeatable records?" If there's a record you think should be there, then let us know...and if you think there's one there that shouldn't be....well try to improve it :) Also of note is that we threw out the runs on the maps tohnsay and well. The reason for this is the same as why we dont allow a 0:04 demo on zer1m6. To quote the news from Jan 6, 1999:

A small notice about the custom level zer1m6: this level can be completed by simply slopejumping from the pool at the start to the trigger_changelevel. This week we received yet another 0:04. We are NOT accepting this run. If you understand what speedrunning is about youll see the logic behind this. What's cooler, watching somebody do a 1-sec demo (cause about 80% of the 0:04 in zer1m6 is movie) with one simple jump, or to watch somebody sneak past I-don't-know-how-many-monsters in no time?

So that leaves four new holes in the tables that can be filled easily....

The last table changes is that the demostats page now includes graphs that show the number of demos done per month/year.

Hey everybody, I realize the page has been a bit sparse on demos latey, that's because while we were all having a good time in Finland we didn't have time to do any updates, and now there's so many demos to update it's taking a while to catch up :) I know I originally promised some people that the demos we did while at Speedcon would be up by this time, but Jesse does not have the page done yet... he's promising tomorrow now. So this update has several demos that Ilkka did back in May but was too lazy to post... He described a lot of them as "lame custom demos" but there's still some good skills.

• Nightmare run of hip1m1 in 0:19, six seconds faster than his previous run!
• Run on armorgod in 0:24 on both easy and nightmare, two seconds faster.
• Easy run of colony in 0:29, two seconds faster than Optic.
• Easy run of darkness in 0:44, four seconds faster than Optic.
• Easy run of flo in 0:48, five seconds faster than Optic.
• Run on jdungen in 0:28 on both easy (four seconds faster than Marlo) and nightmare (six seconds faster than Optic).
• Easy run of village in 1:04, ten seconds faster than Optic.
• Nightmare run of village in 1:10, 1:06 faster than Optic.
• Ilkka filled up all the holes on the least popular map, darkfst:
  Easy run in 2:45, 30 seconds faster than Optic's run, the only demo previous done here.
  Easy 100% in 3:38.
  Nightmare run in 2:52.
  Nightmare 100% in 3:42.

Expect all the coops from Speedcon very soon, and then after that there will be an update for all the demos that were sent in in the meantime. BTW if you send mail to sda and it bounces back to you, it is probably just because Will is having email problems.

I finally got home from Finland a few minutes ago... all in all it took me 60 f*&*#$*@#($&king hours from the time I left Ilkka's to get back home.... not only was I stuck in Paris but my flight from new york was cancelled because of weather and they took 23 hours to get me one another one! Needless to say I'm just a bit worn out since I've been up for 38 hours as I write this with the exception of trying to sleep on a cold hard floor for 3 hours in JFK airport. Well I guess that's all for me until I recover....

About three hours ago I came back from Finland, and the post-SpeedCon chat just ended. Everybody's back home again, except for poor Nolan, whose delayed flight from Helsinki forced him to spend the coming night in Paris...expect some harsh words from him about connecting flights soon ;)

Anyway, just like all the others, I thought SpeedCon was just totally insane; I can't remember that much occasions where I had this much fun. We did loads and loads of coops, ranging from 2-player 100%'s to 6-player runs (!). Lots of DM demos were also recorded the last day, and an entirely new QdQ-production (which for the moment remains to be officially announced) was initiated, and *shock*horror* finished as well.

As you can see, massive amounts of interesting stuff to post. Because this was such a special occasion, we've decided to open a special page for all the demos, which will open at the end of this weekend. Expect some pictures of drunk speedrunners there as well :)

Once again mad thanks to Ilkka, without whom all of this wouldn't have been possible, and also to Stefan for bringing the idea up in the first place.

The speedrunner's meeting starts officially today, woah! Just like Nolan wrote in his previous update, we "saw him on the other side" :). In other words, speedcon is a meeting, in which 8 people are travelling to Finland to my place. They will stay here until next Tuesday-Wednesday, and we have six computers in a network here -> expect some high quality Mad coops! :) Nolan was the first one to arrive yesterday, and the others will travel today. We already managed to do two mad co-op's with Nolan and some other fins:

• E2M1, easy 100% in 0:34 - 5-player mad coop by me, Nolan, J-J, Alex and Matti. This was very fun to do...
• E3M7, easy 100% in 1:01 - 4-player mad coop by me, Nolan, J-J and Alex. Heh, did we have a hard time getting on the lifts at the same time or what? :)

Only two mad coops so far. Some days ago, while we were still building up the computer network here, we managed to record three 2-player coops with Alex, all tablefillers:

• Mcomplex, easy 100% in 1:25 - Lots of cool tricks here!
• Mexx1, easy run in 0:09 - A nice SSG boost to the exit.
• Bbelief 5, nightmare run in 0:20.

Even more days ago, Alex asked me to update these new Single player demos that he has done:

• BBelief 5, Nightmare run in 0:28 - One second faster than Optic. (We just received the same time from Martin Selinus, but Alex's demo was the first one)
• Bbelief 5, Easy 100% in 2:24 - 38(!) seconds faster than Stefan.

That's all so far. Other people's demos will be posted later. (Nolan just woke up btw). Anyway, for the other speedcon attendees, have a nice trip and welcome!

Yea, I'm off too. Just rounding up my work here at the university for my 6-day leave...see previous update for 'more info' on my destination :)

Very shotly I'm leaving to go on a trip, so you won't here from me again until I....reach my destination. Most of you will already know where I'm going and why, and the rest will find out soon enough :)

Three demos before I leave:

• Robert Axelsson improved the easy run of Coagula by one more second to get 0:23, by getting a bit of help.
• Janne improved the easy 100% of iksqp2 by three seconds to get 2:03, now the 8th time he's done that demo :)
• I did another low quality marathon...an easy run through the first rogue episode in a time of 10:29.

See you on the other side.

I've been trying to make really good demos recently but have decided to give up on that for a while and just post what I have even though I'm not satisfied with them:

• Nightmare 100% of r2m1 in 4:03, 23 seconds faster than my previous demo.
• Nightmare 100% marathon through the 2nd rogue episode, in a time of 27:54 (time for EH is 23:38).
• Nightmare run marathon through the whole of the hipnotic pak in 17:46. This one I never tried too hard :)
• Nightmare run marathon through just the 3rd ep of hipnotic in 4:52...tried to make this one really good but oh well.
• Nightmare 100% of zer1m7 in 7:48. I did this over two months ago and never improved it...

Thomas did three more id-level 100% demos:

• Nightmare 100% of e1m8 in 1:21, three seconds faster than his previous demo.
• Easy 100% of e2m6 in 4:11, 15 seconds faster than his previous demo.
• Nightmare 100% of e3m3 in 2:12, 20 seconds faster than my old keyboard demo.

We had three submissions to improve the easy run of Coagula:

• First, Ken sent in a 0:26, promising to do better...
• The next day, he did and sent in 0:25.
• But Qurre stepped in and got 0:24, equalling the nightmare time.

Valeriy Burmistrov has improved both the 100% demos on doom2_07:

• He got 0:11 on easy, one second faster than Matthias, who thought 12 was optimal.
• He improved Stefan's 100% on nightmare by one second to get 0:22.

Thanks to Attila, there's 11 more of those old demos available now...including a really really old nightmare 100% of e1m1 in a time of 1:52 done in July 96. Also a 1:34 for e1m1 NH which I do believe was the first quake speed demo I saw, around December 96...lets say I was inspired :)

Just to warm ourselves up a bit for SpeedCon, the big speedrunner's meeting next week, we decided to do some madcooping today. Also, Ilkka's got his ISDN back recently, making his ping playable, finally.

First, Ilkka, Fab, Attila and I did an easy 100% of IKSPQ1, getting 0:50, which ofcourse is new. Later in the day (Attila had left in the meantime), we hooked up again to do some more, and Marlo joined us to replace Attila: we beat an older 4player-madcoop! We improved the old 4p Easy 100% of E1M5 (Gunnar, Will, Ilkka & Rikkert) by no less than 15(!) seconds, to get 0:29, go check it.

First I'll start with all the demos sent in by crazy d00d Optic:

• Yonatan's nearly 3 year old demo didn't last as a record long...Optic went and improved it by 13 seconds to get 1:43.
• He improved a few of David Eva's (Mr J) old demos. Easy run of black3 in 1:11, six seconds faster.
• Nightmare run of mexx4 in 1:35, 12 seconds faster.
• Easy run of mexx7 in 1:46, five seconds faster.
• Nightmare run of mexx7 in 1:51, five seconds faster than Matthias.
• Easy run of mexx9c in 1:44, three seconds faster than Stefan.
• Justin smashed Stefan's old nightmare run of ikspq5 by 44 seconds to get 1:22.
• And he did one 100% demo, of bbsecret on easy, in 1:35, ten seconds faster than Stefan.

All normal slots of the new Coagula map have now been filled:

• Peter Fincher did the easy run in 0:27, his first demo to SDA.
• Stefan did the nightmare 100% in 3:30...a bit slow, but it fills the hole :)

Alexander Osipov has done two demos on bbelief6:

• Easy run in 0:40, six seconds faster than Optic.
• Easy 100% in 2:31, 18 seconds faster than my previous record, which was one of the oldest 25.

I'm now down to less than 10 records on the oldest list....when it first showed up I had 23 :)
Stefan improved the easy run on dxm and filled the hole for the nightmare run, using a new trick:

• Easy run in 0:17, nine seconds faster than Mr Shambler.
• Nightmare run in 0:20.

Shortly after Jesse updated to say he updated RDE about Robert's improvement of his nightmare run of rd1m2 by two seconds to 0:55, Robert sent in a 0:54.

The last demo of this load is another coop marathon by Ravage and Shine. They improved Robert and Alex's easy run through ep3 by 20 seconds to get 2:37.

Ok I lied because I almost forgot to mention this *again*.... three weeks ago I improved Matthias's easy 100% of hip3m3 by 28 seconds to get 2:03. I added it to the tables, but forgot to mention it in the news! doh!

The old news is not gone forever!

Before SDA launched in April of 1998, there were two pages....one for skill 0 demos (muad_dib's page) and another for skill 3 demos (nightmare speed demos, run only by myself). Back when I did NSD, when the news got "too long" I would delete it and there was a message at the end saying The old news is gone forever... Yes I was dumb for not archiving it somewhere, I know, as it erased some of the beginnings of Quake speed running. Well for some unknown reason, Jesse [who in his is update originally claimed to be jesus :)] had saved one of the news pages from NSD for a period covering 23.11.97 through 20.01.98. You can read it here but there's not much since there was maybe 5 demos a week back then unlike now :) (and I'm never complaining when I say that) None of the links work of course cuz I was also stupid enough to delete demos when they got improved.... That's why a lot of the old demos here at sda have no links to them. I've tried to recover as many of those old demos as possible, as some people had saved them somewhere, but it seems I've got all I can ever have now..... unless there's someone out there that has them.... if so I'd really appreciate if you would email me :)

For your information, a new RDE demo was updated at the Runner's Delight page, along with some useless bits of random inf0.

Link of the day goes out to Jeff K, he 0wnz j00. JeffK.